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12 tips to give a solid scholarly talk within a short time frame

One of the things I’ve noticed at conferences, workshops and seminars is that we tend to overestimate our abilities to give a talk within a short time frame. I see this at MPSA, ISA, AAG, and all other scholarly conferences I attend. We KNOW in advance that we have only 10 minutes, 12 minutes at the very most, and yet we still want to cram a 90 minute talk in 10 minutes.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega at CIESAS workshop

Since I just completed three weeks of back-to-back-to-back academic conferences, I thought I’d offer some tips (to see my entire Twitter thread, just click anywhere on the tweet I show below).

These tips, obviously, are intended to help presenters give better talks. An additional commentary that I think is valuable and I didn’t include at the moment of tweeting include the notion of rehearsing the talk beforehand. This is particularly important because it allows the presenter to learn how long their presentation will really take.

I noticed I made a mistake and did a 9) and 10) TWICE, so here are the other 2 tips, which complete the set of 12 tips.

Hopefully these tips will be useful to fellow academics.

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